The education secretary’s comment assumes significance at a time when the govt is pushing for lateral entry into civil services.
New Delhi: Outgoing education secretary Anil Swarup, who has juggled many roles in his 37-year-long career, has said a bureaucrat does not need any specialisation to handle a particular ministry or a department.
His comment assumes significance at a time when the Modi government is pushing for lateral entry into civil services to bring in “fresh ideas and new approaches”.
“After a particular level of seniority, it is more about managing men and women rather than having detailed knowledge of a particular domain,” Swarup told ThePrint Edior-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on NDTV’s Walk the Talk show.
“Because you may have domain knowledge but ultimately what gets delivered is delivered through the people around you and the manner in which you handle them — that’s the most important. We learn that over a period of time,” he said.
To drive home his point, Swarup gave the example of Parameswaran Iyer who worked in defence and textile ministries, served as the district collector of Bijnor in Uttar Pradesh before taking charge of the Modi government’s flagship scheme, Swachh Bharat Mission.
The BJP-led central government’s decision to recruit professionals from outside the bureaucracy into Indian Administrative Service has already drawn criticism from various quarters.
Swarup, a 1981 batch UP cadre IAS officer, has suggested that UPSC can change the way in which candidates are selected for entry into civil services.
“UPSC should go a step further. Things like group discussions will enable them to understand the skills of a person,” he said.
“Similarly, they could put them in a problem situation and let them come out with a solution. So, there are ways and means and tools through which you can analyse as to whether the person is capable of becoming a good leader in future or not,” Swarup claimed.
He said India should learn from Singapore to improve the candidate selection process.
Known for handling all previous positions with the same rigour, Swarup’s tenure as education secretary was a rather interesting one during which he tackled the “education mafia”, dealt with the CBSE exam-leak issue that affected a large number of children and helped the government reach out to students of Jammu and Kashmir whose studies were affected after the unrest in the Valley in 2016.
The most significant of all these was tackling the “education mafia”, which he claims, is “bigger than the coal mafia”.
“In case of coal, the mining is underground, the mafia is overground. In education, it is the other way round,” he said.
“In coal, the world was against what was going wrong. In case of education, the world doesn’t know what’s wrong. They only see the ultimate wrong. But the underlying problems are much more complex,” Swarup said.
Stressing on the proper training of teachers, he said, “Teacher lies at the pivot of Indian education system…The way teachers are trained before they get into a profession through B.Ed and D.Ed… that is the biggest mafia.”
“Twenty five percent of B.Ed and D.Ed colleges do not exist. They can give you a degree when pay them well. And people tell me that one can get a job as well. It is as bad as that,” he added.
During his tenure, government went tried to reform the B.Ed system but the whole matter is now sub judice.
Swarup also used social media to reach out to people and answered their queries in the wake of the CBSE paper leak controversy.